04/15/2014

Boston Dymanics' Petman now has serious competition in the "eerie human-like robots" category, courtesy of the UK's Ministry of Defence. This new contender is a Â£1.1 million ($1.8 million) masterpiece called Porton Man, named after the Defence...

A large sheet of plywood isn't necessarily heavy, but its massive dimensions can certainly make it unwieldy to carry. And since there's nothing wrong with the whole "work smarter not harder" mentality, this gravity-powered clamping trolley makes it super easy to just roll everything from sheets of wood, to drywall, to basically anything that will fit inside its grasp.

11/16/2013

There are two types of people in this world: those who like the convenience of autofill, and those who don't think a browser should double as a PA. For the former group, Google's updating its mobile Chrome apps today, and autophilics will be pleased to hear the feature is being added to iOS, with ...

11/10/2013

We in the tech press are great at covering what it’s like to be a startup founder. But the world does not live by entrepreneurs alone.

One big reason that companies are so keen to tout venture capital fundraising is because the new money enables them to hire more staff — the people who build stuff, who really make the tech industry tick. Ideally, that flashy funding can help them attract some of the industry’s most kick-ass backend engineers, product managers, the UX designers. The top-tier tech people who are on the receiving end of the whole “hiring craze” everyone seems to be talking about.

What do those people actually do? Who are they? It’s something that TechCrunch doesn’t often talk about. But we should.

And that’s why I’m happy to introduce Inside Jobs, a new TechCrunch TV series that covers the work lives of the people who make this whole crazy world go ’round.

For our premeire episode of Inside Jobs, we’re so happy to have Jon Jenkins, who is the Director of Engineering at a little web property you might have heard of called Pinterest. Despite its massive reach (and massive funding), Pinterest is still in many ways a startup at heart, with an engineering team that clearly punches above its weight when compared to other big web names that have engineering teams many times its size.

Jenkins joining Pinterest was one of those hiring coups that was covered by many tech reporters — yours truly included — so it was a big pleasure to have him give us a glimpse into what exactly he does every day, and the challenges and perks that come with his gig.Credits for Inside Jobs go to producer and production coordinator Felicia Williams, and producer, shooter and editor John Murillo.

11/07/2013

Microsoft promised earlier this year that it would soon be updating its Office Web Apps so that multiple people could edit documents at the same time (yes, just like in Google Drive). Now, five months later, the company's finally ready to show us the finished product. Starting today, you can work on a Microsoft Word document, PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet, even if someone else is already in there editing. And if you happen to be offline, you can make your changes in the regular desktop suite and they'll sync up with the web version once you re-establish an internet connection.

As with Google Docs, an unlimited number of people can edit at once -- at least in Word and Excel (PowerPoint has a hard limit of 20 simultaneous editors). Also like Google, Microsoft gives you not one, but two indicators as to where someone is inside the document. These include a list in the upper-right corner, with helpful specifics like "Dana Wollman editing slide 12." Then, once you scroll through the document, you'll also see pinpoints indicating what people are working on. And in case none of that was intuitive enough, each person will also be marked with a distinct color (yep, also like Google Docs). As you'd expect, all of this will roll out for both SkyDrive and Office 365, though Microsoft warns it could take until the end of week before these co-editing features are available to everybody.

Additionally, Microsoft made a few tweaks to the individual web apps themselves. These include the ability to find and replace words in Word, as well as insert headers and footers. In Excel, meanwhile, you can now drag and drop cells and reorder sheets. The Web version also now supports more workbook types, which should help if you use sheet protection. Finally, if you're used to editing presentations in PowerPoint, you now have the ability to crop photos from within the web app. Also, though there isn't an update on this, per se, Microsoft did reiterate that it's on track to release an Android tablet app sometime within the next few months. Don't say we didn't warn you.

11/04/2013

"Every song we've ever written was a rip-off of a Lou Reed song," Bono once announced from the stage, while bringing Reed up to sing on a duet of "Satellite of Love," a staple during U2's Zoo TV tour. What Bono said reconfirmed what many fans think about Reed, who died Sunday: He was a giant among rock stars, and a good deal of the punk and indie bands that followed in his wake were happy to be orbiting objects.

The most famous quote having to do with Reed's music may be apocryphal. "The first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band," Brian Eno is alleged to have said. We say alleged because Eno's biographer couldn't find any trace of the original aphorism (and anyway, that album, 1967's The Velvet Underground & Nico, actually sold more than 58,000 copies in its first two years of release). But: Point taken! It's hard to find even a 2010s rock band that doesn't have the Velvets as an influence, or that wouldn't at least lie and say they were, if asked.

Lou Reed was not the most influential man in rock 'n' roll; as long as Elvis Presley isn't erased from history, that'll be a hard mantle to cede. But is Lou the most cited influence in rock? Now, that one, he has a lock on. As much of a household name as he became, he never became nearly mainstream enough to become a signifying cliché. And in a celebrity culture where hotter is always better (not to be confused with White Light/White Heat), he epitomized cool to the sellout-free end.

Arguably...no, maybe make that inarguably...without Reed, we wouldn't have had punk. As the "godfather" of the movement, he was, after all, the cover boy for the very first issue of Punk magazine, a publishing moment immortalized in the recent CBGB film, which briefly dramatized Lou in his mid-'70s blond phase. And without punk, pretty much every band you liked in the last 30 years would disappear from the landscape like goodness dissipated from the alternate reality in It's a Wonderful Life. If Lou had a penny royalty from every act that owed him a debt, he'd have been able to hire Justin Bieber as his houseboy.

Morrissey found seeing the man who recorded Transformer to be a transforming experience. "At the age of 12 I went to see Lou Reed by myself. Which was extraordinary now, on reflection, to go and see Lou Reed at the age of 12 in Manchester and to survive the experience," the former Smiths frontman told Britain's Telegraph. It "seems extraordinary to me now, to imagine a 12- or 13-year-old going by themselves, to see somebody such as Lou Reed who was at the time singing exclusively about transsexuality and heroin and death and the beauty of death and the impossibility of life." To Morrissey, Reed was nothing less than "the WH Auden of the modern world."

Bono also waxed poetic with his literary comparisons, declaring, "Lou Reed is to New York what Mark Twain is to Dublin."

For many the influence had more to do with Reed's seemingly simple-to-replicate talk/sing vocal tones and streetwise lyricism than his chops, although he certainly worked with top-flight musicians over the years. In the Rolling Stone History of Rock, critic Ken Tucker cited his influence on proto-punk band the New York Dolls: "The mean wisecracks and impassioned cynicism that informed the Dolls' songs represented an attitude that Reed's work with the Velvet Underground embodied, as did the Dolls' distinct lack of musicianship."

Was he "mean"? That was the image, at least, for a long time. The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde wasn't just influenced by him as a musician; she wrote about him when she was a rock critic at NME in the mid-'70s. Reviewing the 1974 live album Rock 'n' Roll Animal, Hynde summarized the appeal of his unwillingness to kiss up to a fanbase: "He looks like a monkey on a chain, court geek," wrote the future rock star. "Listen to him scramble to a corner, damaged and grotesque, huddled in rodent terror. Animal Lou. Lashing out in a way that could make the current S&M trend freeze in its shallow tracks. And the audience cheers after every song: we’re with you, yeah, we always loved those songs, ha ha. Well…he hates you.”

In his interview with the Telegraph decades later, Morrissey downplayed the idea of Reed as "grumpy." "He’s terribly nice! Terribly, terribly nice," insisted Morrissey — although, as an admitted misanthrope himself, Morrissey may not be the best judge of that. "And he’s one of those people who, when I first met him, I expected the worst. But he’s terribly nice. Once again, very friendly and very interested. Not a difficult, abrasive moment. But you have to remember that throughout the '70s he was exclusively drug-ravaged. And that doesn’t really make for terribly balanced relationships."

With the Sex Pistols, the influence was visible right in a name: The last half of Sid Vicious's moniker came from Reed's "Vicious." Johnny Rotten, though, was a rare non-admirer. He didn't object to Reed's music, just his association in the early '70s with the drug culture (Lou later cleaned up). According to Rotten/Lydon, Vicious "had a Lou Reed record and he believed in the druggy image Lou gave off," Lydon told The Daily Star after the band's breakup. "Sid's downfall was that he didn't get a chance to meet Lou Reed before he knew what he was doing. He would never have messed with heroin had he seen what a vacuous fat slob Lou Reed really is." Needless to say, perhaps, Lydon was influenced by Reed's cantankerousness, if nothing else.

For the British proto-punk band the Buzzcocks, it would be far harder to downplay the influence: They got together after Howard Devoto placed an ad looking for band members who could join him in playing the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray."

Some bands came to the Velvet Underground via Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers, who really took Reed's minimalist ball and ran with it in the early '70s, even as he was becoming more interested, for a time, in the expansiveness of glam-rock. "If the Velvet Underground had a protégé, it would be Jonathan," said Sterling Morrison. By at least one account, Richman saw the band 80 times as a youngster in the '60s. The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" — which some saw as a virtual rewrite of the VU — was a song that helped spur punk as we knew it. Eventually, Richman wrote and recorded a song called "Velvet Underground":

Both guitars got the fuzz tone onThe drummer's standing upright pounding alongA howl, a tone, a feedback whineBiker boys meet the college kindHow in the world were they making that sound?Velvet Underground

But it wasn't all attitude. There were songs there. "I like their darkness, but I also like the pop side of the Velvet Underground," Martin Gore, who certainly wasn't influenced by the group's fuzzy guitars as the mastermind behind the mostly guitar-less Depeche Mode, told Release magazine. "I do a cover of a Velvet Underground song ['Candy Says'], and they were one of the most important bands, for me."

If you want to talk about covers, the list is endless. "Satellite of Love," besides being covered by U2 every night on the Zoo TV tour (with Reed usually appearing on a video screen as duet partner), was also recorded by Eurythmics and Porno for Pyros. U2 also had "Sweet Jane" as a tour staple in the '80s, when Bono would sing it as a duet with Maria McKee of opening act Lone Justice. "Sweet Jane" was also an FM radio hit for Mott the Hoople in the early '70s and Cowboy Junkies in the late '80s. David Bowie, who produced Reed in the mid-'70s, recorded a version of "White Light/White Heat" in '73 and released it as a single a decade later. Billy Idol put out his cover of "Heroin" as a single in 1993. Duran Duran recorded two of Reed's songs, "Femme Fatale" and "Perfect Day." Both of those tunes have been widely covered by others, as well. "Femme" is in the recorded catalogs of Big Star, Tom Tom Club, R.E.M., and Elvis Costello.

"Perfect Day" covers have proven controversial: Though the lyrics are depressing in an underlying way, and some would say reflect his addiction at the time, the ostensibly upbeat title has led to seemingly "positive" cover versions, including an allstar group-sing that was a British charity single in 1997 and a variety of TV commercials. By the time Susan Boyle covered it, some Reed fans began to wonder whether his influence on pop music had extended a little too far.

These aren't even the half of it. "I'm Waiting for the Man," alone, has been covered on record or in concert by OMD, Cheap Trick, Vanessa Paradis, Bowie, and Robert Plant & Jimmy Page. An original Death Cab for Cutie song quotes from it. Joy Division, another obviously influencee, did "Sister Ray"; Nirvana, with an equally traceable lineage, did "Here She Comes Now." Roxy Music took some cues from the Velvets, so it was no surprise to see Bryan Ferry doing "What Goes On." The ballad "Pale Blue Eyes," meanwhile, has been taken up by Hole, R.E.M., Patti Smith, the Kills, Alejandro Escovedo, and the duo of Sheryl Crow & Emmylou Harris.

But Beck outdid them all — recording a cover version of the Velvet Underground & Nico album in its entirety, released exclusively to his record club. "I grew up listening to the Velvet Underground,” Beck told the Wall Street Journal when it came out this August. “When I was 15, I was taken with trying to imitate Lou Reed.” He'd covered "Sunday Morning" frequently before, but "by doing the whole album, you get to do some of the lesser-known songs you would’ve never chosen to perform. You end up learning things.” The whole thing was recorded in one day, but the album's ubiquitousness among his fellow musicians made that not a problem, Beck said: "The Velvet Underground & Nico was an obvious choice [because] everybody was familiar with it. It took us a couple of minutes to figure out the songs.”

In "Rock & Roll" — a song that was covered by the Runaways and Jane's Addiction — Reed sang about a girl whose life was "saved by rock 'n' roll." For Morrissey, Richman, Bono, Michael Stipe, David Byrne, Sonic Youth, and too many thousands of others to count, Reed, seemingly standoffish as he could be, was the very specific savior in question. Rock itself might owe Reed a saving debt.

11/01/2013

Two passengers on a bus talk about the suicide car crash near Tiananmen Gate as the bus drives past the spot where, on Monday, a sport utility vehicle crashed and caught fire, in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Chinese police are circulating a list of eight suspects wanted in connection with the apparent suicide car crash near Tiananmen Square in Beijing that killed five people and injured dozens, a hotel manager said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)

Two passengers on a bus talk about the suicide car crash near Tiananmen Gate as the bus drives past the spot where, on Monday, a sport utility vehicle crashed and caught fire, in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Chinese police are circulating a list of eight suspects wanted in connection with the apparent suicide car crash near Tiananmen Square in Beijing that killed five people and injured dozens, a hotel manager said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)

BEIJING (AP) — China's top security official blamed a little-known militant group for this week's suicide car crash that killed five people in the heart of the capital, renewing Beijing's disputed claim that the country faces a significant, organized terrorist threat.

Meng Jianzhu offered no details of the allegations against the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and it isn't clear whether the group has the ability to orchestrate terror strikes. Beijing says the movement is dedicated to the violent overthrow of Chinese rule in the northwestern region of Xinjiang that is home to the country's Turkic Muslim Uighur minority.

Police said they found flags imprinted with religious slogans among items in the SUV used in the attack and at the temporary lodgings of five arrested suspects.

China's government has said previous attacks in Xinjiang were inspired by jihadi propaganda and has linked several of them directly to the ETIM.

Meng named the group in an interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television during a visit to the capital of Uzbekistan to attend a regional security summit.

"Behind the instigation is the terrorist group East Turkestan Islamic Movement entrenched in central and west Asian regions," Meng, chief of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the ruling Communist Party, said in the interview.

No one has claimed responsibility for Monday's attack.

On Friday, additional vehicle barriers were in place along the route the SUV took as it plowed through crowds toward Tiananmen Gate, killing three in the car and two tourists, including a Filipino woman, and injuring dozens. Extra police conducted random bag and ID checks among the tourists circulating beneath the huge portrait of Mao Zedong hanging from the gate where the vehicle burst into flames after crashing.

Security has been strengthened in Xinjiang, and Uighurs in Beijing have been subjected to increased police checks.

Beijing police said the perpetrators were a man with a Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) name, his wife and his mother. Police have arrested five people — identified with typically Uighur names — on suspicion of conspiring in the strike — the city's first in recent history.

The 9 million-strong Uighurs have close cultural and linguistic ties to Turkic peoples of Central Asia and traditionally follow a moderate version of Sunni Islam. Many complain of Chinese cultural and religious restrictions and discrimination by the country's ethnic Han majority.

The United States placed the ETIM on a terrorist watch list following the Sept. 11 attacks, but quietly removed it amid doubts that it existed in any organized manner. It is still listed as a terrorist group by the United Nations and a handful of other Asian nations, as well as China.

Uighur activists say Beijing places the blame on alleged terrorists in order to ignore very real discontent over economic and political discrimination among Uighurs. The most prominent exiled Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, whom Beijing blamed for orchestrating deadly 2009 rioting in Xinjiang, disavows violence and says Beijing is seeking to blunt overseas criticism of its policies by linking itself to the global anti-terrorist struggle.

Information about the group's organization and capabilities is difficult to come by, particularly its ability to launch attacks outside of Xinjiang, although University of Michigan Xinjiang expert Phillip Potter says the Pakistan-based ETIM leadership has close ties with the Taliban and could be gaining in sophistication.

"The result is cross-fertilization between previously isolated movements, leading to the diffusion of tactics and capabilities that have the potential to increase the sophistication and lethality of terrorism in China," Potter wrote in a forthcoming article for the publication Strategic Studies Quarterly.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said America supported China's investigation into the matter, but declined to call it a terrorist attack and reiterated U.S. support for Uighur human rights.

10/29/2013

It may not have been a planned pregnancy, but DJ Pauly D is glad to be a father. Following the surprising news that the 33-year-old former Jersey Shore star has secretly welcomed a baby girl with a past hookup, the MTV star is stepping up and taking responsibility.

"Sometimes in life things aren't planned and they may even scare you at first, but they end up being a blessing, that is how I feel about having a daughter," he says in a statement to Us Weekly on Thursday, Oct. 24. "I'm looking forward to being a parent to her." (Pauly D, real name Paul DelVecchio, also tweeted a similar sentiment on Thursday.)

Pauly D confirmed to TMZ that he recently welcomed a daughter with a former fling on Tuesday, Oct. 22. "I'm proud I'm a father," he told Us. "I am excited to embark on this new part of my life."

Since then, TMZ has further revealed that Pauly D's daughter is five-months-old and named Amabella. Her mother is Amanda Markert, a former Hooters waitress and current VIP hostess. Markert also has an older child, a son named Mikey, from a previous relationship.

Pauly D only recently found out that he was a father. "She contacted him after the baby was born. He of course had to take precautions before believing the baby was his, but he is definitely excited to be a dad," an insider told Us. "Pauly is taking responsibility and will be in this child's life one way or another."